Ten years ago the lake gave everyone back. That was not the end of it.
Ben Bender was eight when he watched a man vanish off a Vermont lake and drew what he saw in crayon. Nobody believed him. His own family taught him to doubt his eyes, and he grew up strange and quiet, hearing what people meant beneath the words they said.
At eighteen, a letter arrives from the woman who was tried for that man's murder. She kept Ben's drawing for ten years. She has been waiting to tell him he was right.
He goes north to a lake going wrong again. The birds are gone. The returned are failing. And something has found the crack the miracle left behind, something that does not study people, and does not give them back, and steals them out of the memory of everyone who loved them.
Only five people in the valley still remember her name.
Some things the lake kept. Some things it gave back. And some things were never its to keep.